Wow. And ew. And wow again. This story should've been disgusting and absurd. Okay, it was disgusting and absurd, but it was also very powerful. I don't know how that got pulled off the way it did.
The initial reveal catching the brother's Wriggling Death detaching in the woods was done very well, because it was staged as the end of naivette at the discovery of sex. I mean, I already knew they were very humanish but weirdly inhuman at the same time with all the litters and whatnot, but suddenly at that moment when the Wriggling Death detaches, the whole story suddenly turned about 90 degrees. And while the image of the inchworm penis pursuing them into the bushes was absurdly funny, it was simultaneously freaky.
I liked how the differences in how the sexes work here was explored with the consentual sex all happening between the women, and the men holding no social power because of their lifespan and limited function (kind of like bees, I think).
I thought the ending was pretty horrifying. I'm not sure what I think about that, to me it made the character take a sharp twist in personality that didn't seem to match what came before. I think the story works better without that.
Interesting comments by Alasdair. Personally I didn't think it was so much about rape (though there were certainly elements of it, especially as she's staggering to the house with them crawling all over her, that could've been a gang rape). Personally, to me, it reminded me of how in many time periods and settings women have been treated as reproductive vessels and little else. Especially the TV image of 50s housewife whose purpose is to be a mother and to clean and etc, but also to some extent noblewomen who are expected to produce heirs for their husbands. In these settings, an unmarried woman can hold a fair amount of power as she's being wooed and courted, but once the marriage happens and she becomes pregnant, everything is expected to change. She can't be an object of sexual desire anymore! She's a mother! Think of the children! Which is of course, absurd--after all, unless we're talking about adoption or modern medical technology, having sex is a prerequisite to becoming a mother, and the desire doesn't turn off just because a baby has happened. (Not that a new baby can't provoke a dry spell, mind you, caused by sleeplessness, the woman's physical and emotional healing from the pregnancy and birth, shifted focus in the relationship from each other to childcare, but I mean that a mother doesn't stop having sexual desires just because she's a mother) So to me the fact that her sex organs are now blocked and unusable made me think of how a woman might feel after becoming pregnant where she felt social pressure to completely devote herself to being a mother and suppressing sexual aspects of herself.